It is well understood that the backup strategy is the single most important part of business resilience, after the creation of the data itself. It is taken as standard practice to safeguard data using various methods depending on the data and rate of change. All these things should be considered as part of a Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy. Successful backup strategies usually utilise the Grandfather, Father, Son methods for data retention.

Grandfather – Monthly Full
Father – Weekly Full
Son – Daily Incremental / Reverse Incremental or Daily Full
Looking something like this for a 4 week strategy based on a 5 day working week.

Now, this has been a proven method for retention to allow the recovery of data in the most comprehensive manner for many years now. How can this be made better?
By introducing the Grandmother, Step Father and Step Son into the mix. This is how it works:-

Grandmother – Monthly Storage snap of Backup data in the cloud. All-inclusive data.
Step Father – Weekly synthetic Full of replicated backup data in the cloud
Step Son – Duplicated Daily reverse incremental to cloud.

Using this method in the cloud makes it possible to call upon data from any day for any Month. This is always dependant on the retention period of the Grandmother data, however this is also conditional on the amount of cloud storage purchased / available.
This is not instead of the onsite backup, but in addition to the resilience of the data recovery methods already in place. This can have multiple feeds. So, many sites can utilise the same cloud storage through many Veeam nodes onsite. This is how backups would look for retention purposes and how many copies of the data there would be for security over time. The following diagram shows how this could be structured:-
 

So, what are the requirements?

Virtual servers only. VMware or HyperV (Physical servers can be accommodated only using different backup software and backing this service up through Veeam)

Network transit bandwidth suitable to cope with daily data change.

Licences for Veeam Services onsite to interconnect to the Veeam Cloud Connect services.

Suitable time schedule windows for backups to run on the servers.

And the benefits?

Secondary backup of the server estate in an offsite location.

Recovery of services can be done to any environment with a Veeam Cloud Connect setup. Meaning, if there are multiple sites and the bandwidth to run the services, the full server data could be recovered to any location and configured to be running as if nothing had changed.

Servers could be recovered to the Cloud Server farm and be running almost instantly utilising the cloud compute of the cloud partner. This means a total loss situation can be avoided by adding this recovery method into the DR strategy (with a few additions for DNS changes and such) and covers the business for full site recovery into the cloud. In the event this does get called upon, this also maintains a suitable environment to migrate back from when the situation is resolved.

For more information about backup design and solutions, please contact Tractive Solutions Ltd., and let us help you to get the correct design in place.

info@tractivesolutions.com
or call on 0844 357 9031